Eating every 2-3 hours a MYTH!??? WTH!

It is the illusion of a health benefit packaged for helpless morons.

As one of those "helpless morons", I agree. A more steady-state blood sugar level keeps me at an "I'm satisfied, I only need to eat a little bit" level all day long. And when my blood sugar is low and I'm feeling dizzy and cranky because I haven't eaten anything in 12 hours, I'm helpless to resist my cravings and I make moronic food decisions.

But as long as calories burned > calories eaten, you're good - whatever you as an individual find works for you. If you're the type of person who prefers to eat your daily allotment calories in a sitting and can manage not to eat anything else for 24 hours, then that's what you should do. If you can eat (your daily allotment)/20 calories an hour for 20 hours, that also works. And anything in between is fine.

unless you're diabetic, i am pretty sure this is all in your head

You can have low blood sugar without being a diabetic.

I'm pretty sure he knows his body a lot better than you do.

It is the illusion of a health benefit packaged for helpless morons.

As one of those "helpless morons", I agree. A more steady-state blood sugar level keeps me at an "I'm satisfied, I only need to eat a little bit" level all day long. And when my blood sugar is low and I'm feeling dizzy and cranky because I haven't eaten anything in 12 hours, I'm helpless to resist my cravings and I make moronic food decisions.

But as long as calories burned > calories eaten, you're good - whatever you as an individual find works for you. If you're the type of person who prefers to eat your daily allotment calories in a sitting and can manage not to eat anything else for 24 hours, then that's what you should do. If you can eat (your daily allotment)/20 calories an hour for 20 hours, that also works. And anything in between is fine.

unless you're diabetic, i am pretty sure this is all in your head

You can have low blood sugar without being a diabetic.

I'm pretty sure he knows his body a lot better than you do.

sure you can, but you won't get it from fasting for five hours

Re-read it. He said 12 hours. And again, regardless of what you think you know and want to apply to a stranger, he knows what works for him so there's really no point in trying to debunk what he's applying to himself. It's not like he's applying it to you or anyone else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iZawGXJADk

I had these same questions so I did some investigation and I've summarized what I found, below. If anyone wants links to the source documents or studies, send me a PM and I can provide them. So...in no particular order, what I've learned in support of eating multiple smaller meals a day:

1) Protein utilization - You cannot utilize more than ~30 grams of protein per meal for anabolic purposes. Protein consumed in excess of this amount is either used for its caloric value (not optimal because protein is a "dirty" fuel), or will be stored as fat. Individuals with protein needs in excess of 90 grams/day, and who only eat 3 meals/day run the risk of being in a continual protein deficit. The body will react to this by catabolizing lean body mass.

2) Excess thermogenesis of multiple meals - This is not a myth. It has been demonstrated that single, large meals are more efficiently processed than are multiple, smaller meals of equivalent caloric value. Another way of saying this is that it takes more calories to process multiple small meals. The difference in the caloric requirements is not trivial, and does effectively raise the metabolic rate of the individual eating multiple meals.

3) Fat storage - Larger, less frequent meals produce a greater insulin response, which results in increased fat storage.

4) Reduced time spent in energy deficit - This is related to the first point listed, but is slightly different. Consider that at any given time your body has a specific requirement for energy. It is less when you are at rest and more when you are exercising. Similarly, at any given time your body is receiving a certain amount of energy through nutrition. This level is high immediately following a meal and will taper off over time. Studies have shown that the less time spent during the day in energy deficit (and the avoidance of large deficits), the lower the amount of muscle catabolism the body will employ. Consider an extreme example of this: A person exercises hard in the morning, and eats one meal a day in the evening. Even if that meal is sufficient to cover the individual's daily caloric requirements, they will have spent most of the day in an energy deficit, catabolizing lean muscle mass, and they will spend most of the evening in a large caloric surplus, with a high insulin response, laying down fat. Think of this as reverse body recomposition. Now consider a person on the opposite end of the spectrum. They eat 5 small meals a day and they time their largest meals to be before and after their exercise period. This person can support both muscle growth and fat reduction. Ignoring that the frequent eater will have burned more calories as a result of the frequent meals, in these two example the two individuals will have engaged in the same amount of exercise and eating the same amount of calories per day, but by managing the amount of time during the day spent in extreme surplus or deficit, they will experience very different outcomes.

The slide below illustrates this. Eating Pattern 1 shows a person eating multiple small meals a day. Eating Pattern 2 shows a person eating three large meals a day. Eating Patter 3 shows a person eating one large meal in the evening. It's important to note that all three end the day at the 0 line, meaning that they all exactly covered their calorie requirements. However, each of them spent all of the minutes and hours during the day at various levels of caloric surplus or deficit. Studies suggest that Eating Pattern 1 is optimal for avoiding fat creation and muscle catabolism.


Anyway...that's what I've found, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it! :laugh:

interesting. I 've always eating small meals frequently, I'm the same size I was in high school.

Lee Labrada

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/lee-labrada-12-week-lean-body-trainer-nutrition-overview.html

Additional source

Eat often. Berardi recommends eating every 2 to 3 hours. Each time you eat, you stimulate your metabolism for a short period of time, which means that the more often you eat, the more you’ll increase your metabolism. Eating every 2 to 3 hours feeds muscle and starves fat. By eating frequently, you reassure your body that you aren’t going to starve; that food will always be available. Skipping breakfast, eating only a sandwich for lunch, and pigging out at dinner, on the other hand, frightens your body into storing fat, just in case your next meal never comes. Research from Georgia State University shows that people who eat every 2 to 3 hours have less body fat and faster metabolisms than those who eat only 2 or 3 meals per day.

Back to the Basics

http://www.dietitiancassie.com/back-to-the-basics-nutrition-101/

This goes 100% against human evolution. The human body evolved to eat large amounts of food at I e time, and then fast for an extended period of time until the next meal. If early humans had to eat every hour or two in order to function properly, the human race would've gone extinct over a million years ago.

For the record, it takes 3 to 4 days of complete fasting to see any kind of metabolic slowdown. Skipping breakfast and having a bigger dinner will actually offer a slight metabolic boost.

You do what YOUR body tells YOU to do, and stop listening to the BS claims that timing your eating to someone else's schedule will work for YOU.

Personally, I'm a snacker. When I can, I eat a very small something about every 1-2 hours. There are two reasons for this.

1. If I "starve" myself and wait for a full meal, I'm gonna eat. And eat. Because I'm HUNGRY. I'm not going to make good decisions. Because I'm HUNGRY. And when the table's empty I'm gonna hit the fridge. If I nibble all day long I'm never hungry. When I sit down for meals, I can look at the array of fuels laid out before me and make rational decisions about enjoying a little of what I want, and eating more of what I need.

2. Grazing gives me fewer opportunities to sit down in a setting where there ARE large amounts of food available.

Yes, I could plan out supper, but when I get home and I haven't eaten since lunchtime, my plans fall apart, and so does the fridge door in my desperate rush to get in there and start chewing at anything that doesn't move (and club anything that does and eat that anyway).

However, I have a lot of friends who can't stand grazing, and prefer 3, 2, or even in some cases 1 meal a day. I'd be stark-raving-bat$hit-crazy-hungry if I tried that, but it works for them.

EDIT: I also feel that eating smaller amounts more constantly gets me more used to being "satisfied" and less used to being "full", so when large amounts of food become available I don't feel like I have the stomach capacity to eat a LOT. I don't think my stomach is actually getting smaller, and it may well be psychosomatic for me to feel that way (and there are certainly times when I eat more than I should!), but I feel like converting to eating small amounts more frequently has allowed me to exercise better portion control when unhealthy foods are presented to me. I can be satisfied with half a donut instead of eating three of them. Again, I don't think there's a physiological explanation, but the psychology is working on me and that's enough for me!

IN for frightening my body into ignoring thermodynamics!!!